


Into orbit

by JaqofSpades



Category: Wynonna Earp (TV)
Genre: Drabble Meme, Multi, really not a drabble
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-14
Updated: 2017-09-14
Packaged: 2018-12-29 19:32:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12091890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JaqofSpades/pseuds/JaqofSpades
Summary: Loving an Earp was a lonely fate. Wynonna is not Wyatt, but her destiny holds her just as tight, and her friends, her lovers – they'll be left in the dust just the same, Doc knows.  She was the earth, and Dolls and himself mere moons, but maybe, orbits could cross.  Collide.  Coincide.





	Into orbit

**Author's Note:**

> Written in response to the drabble meme over on tumblr - I may not have even tried to keep this to a drabble.   
> Orbitelunaire requested wyndolliday (best.name.ever) 12: She's hiding behind the sofa. I was thinking it would be a bit of lighthearted fun, and then Doc came out to play.

The marshal blasts through the front door like a summer storm hurtling in from the prairie. A storm, John Henry knows, from which he would be well advised to seek shelter. Instead, he risks all.

Someone needs to.

They've been dancing around this thing too long, and Wynonna may have inadvertently brought things to a head, but by all the hells – there was no point in being shy about it now. They were what they were, and the rules of society, even those of this surprising new world, simply did not apply.

He suspects Dolls and Wynonna know that already, but are struggling to accept it. And if took an ungodly tempest to help them along, so be it.

“She's hiding behind the sofa,” he says.

Dolls glares at him as if it was he who committed the outrage, and Wynonna's runaway mouth aside, he supposes he has. Loyalty above all is their creed, loyalty to their cobbled together little family, but most of all, to her. Wynonna. The hub to their wheel – nay. The earth to their moons, her pull irresistible and the two of them willing slaves to it.

Surely this tiny betrayal serves that greater good.

Wynonna, he is sure, will not hold it against him. Not when she is forced to explain her frustrated outburst, and not when her marshal inevitably bows to the yearning she has concealed.

“Both of you,” she'd snapped when Dolls had tiptoed around the issue one too many times. “I want him in front of me and you behind me and both of you armed for fucking bear, Dolls!”

Now, John Henry wasn't sure how that translates, but he didn't have to guess. They'd talked about it, him and Wynonna, driven themselves into a frenzy imagining the coiled force of Xavier Dolls exploding between them. But the marshal had not had that luxury. He'd shot a frantic glance up the bar to where John Henry had pretending not to eavesdrop, mouth agape as if he was waiting to be told it was all a joke. Maybe that's why he'd missed Wynonna slamming back her drink and sprinting out of there.

Dolls had sat there, stunned, and John Henry had gone after Wynonna.

“He's gonna hate me,” she'd moaned, collapsing down into the too-soft, oversized chair she insists on calling a sofa. He sunk down beside her and patted at her shoulder, but a barrage of unpalatable memories was already turning him to stone. It wasn't Wynonna who was going to be rejected.

It wasn't Wynonna that Dolls would come gunning for. (It's what always happens when they find out about him.)

Then she wailed and upended herself over the back of the sofa to hide and that sheer anguish - he found himself human again, her misery convincing him it was time to bite the bullet, once and for all. Perhaps it wouldn't hurt so much this time. Xavier Dolls has surprised him more than once. So when the storm blows in, he welcomes it inside.

It's a gentlemen's agreement they had, he and Dolls, that when one was courting Wynonna, the other would leave. His feet itch with the need to comply, but Dolls pins him with a glance full of warning. Apparently, they are to thrash this out as a threesome.

He does hope they progress beyond glaring at each other at some point.

“Explain.”

The terse order has Wynonna abandoning her tears to scowl back, shoulders bunching up for defensively. “It was just – we – sometimes ...”

He will _not_ respond to that look of maidenly distress.

“We?” Dolls barks, and spins to glare him down once more. “ _We_?”

“Mere lover's talk,” he blurts, already cursing his words. Wynonna and Dolls are the lovers, he is a mere lucky bystander. An interloper with certain delicious privileges. Even if there was a triangle, he would be far, far away from the other two …

“Like what, exactly?”

Wynonna blushes, something of which he is frankly surprised she is capable, and Dolls' eyes widen a notch further. “Um – ah – just … us. Together. All three.”

“I got that part. Why?”

Why?

There, of course, is the nub of the matter. Because wanting Dolls is a familiar ache – he'd been aware of it longer than he wanted to shoot the man – but their unlikely fantasies offer far more than that. It's not just a romp they fantasise about.

“I'd just like wake up with the two of you, and feel you both next to me, warm and safe,” Wynonna had confessed once. “Watch you kiss each other awake, maybe.”

The conversation had spiralled back to threeway fucking remarkably quickly, but the underlying emotion never quite left his thoughts. Loving an Earp was a lonely fate. Wynonna is not Wyatt, but her destiny holds her just as tight, and her friends, her lovers – they'll be left in the dust just the same.

She was the earth, and they mere moons, but maybe, orbits could cross.

Collide.

Coincide.

He'd stared up at the moon through Miss Waverley's telescope, once, agog at the remarkable technologies that had lassoed the night sky in the years since he had been thrown down that bedamned well. The silvery disc he'd grown up thinking was mystical adjunct to Mother Earth held much less mystery these days, but being able to gaze on her mountains and crevasses … it only increased his love for her.

“One day we might have another moon,” Wynonna's sister had explained. “All it would take is for the earth to trap a meteorite with her gravity. How cool would that be?”

Not unique, he remembers thinking, but marvellous indeed.

Far less lonely, he thinks now, and steps forward. Slides his hand over the muscled bulk of Dolls's shoulder, and down to tangle with his hand. Pulls him in close until they are toe to toe to toe, he and Dolls and Wynonna.

“Because we are good together. But things could be so much better,” he says quietly, knowing they can't pretend for even a moment this is about anything as simple as sex.

That doesn't even have to be part of the equation.

But Dolls hasn't taken a swing at him or even stepped away, his chest barreling with the force of the deep breaths he uses to calm himself. His hand is clenching in John Henry's own, but it's still there. Clutching at him as much as it is vibrating with suppressed emotion. A man poised on the brink, his gut yells. One nudge and …

He twines his wrist around Dolls' hand, pulling it to Wynonna's waist, and leans up to slick his tongue along that outrageously tempting lower lip.

“Will you let me kiss you?” John Henry murmurs, and Wynonna and Dolls offer a fervent chorus in the affirmative.

Tentative exploration quickly gives way to hungrier forces, Wynonna keening between them as their lips adore the sharp lines of her fierce face, two sets of hands working to make her gulp and curse and shake. When she cries out, they move into a higher orbit to celebrate, kissing and kissing and kissing until the need to do more overtakes them.

It's Wynonna who leads them into the bedroom, Dolls who undresses John Henry, and John Henry who drops to his knees to worship. He can't single out the moment when it happened, when the slightly vexed “you” and “us” became a deliriously sated “we”, but somehow, somehow …

… the universe shifts, newly birthed destinies moving neatly into orbit.

_fin_


End file.
